13 hidden traits!
"Useless slave bastards! Can't you walk faster?"
Slaaash!
With a prickling pain, consciousness came back to me.
But my body, unable to find its balance, rolled across the ground, and only after I'd buried my head in the sand did I realize something was wrong.
'What the hell is this situation?'
I was watching the game intro and then I blacked out.
And when I came to again, this was where I was.
It was a terrifyingly bewildering situation, but my head was colder than I expected.
'This isn't my body.'
Thick hands, corded muscle so rugged even a gym trainer would weep.
It wasn't my body, but it felt vivid, as if it were.
And judging by my hands tied tight and the situation around me, I was being dragged somewhere.
When I lifted my head, hundreds of men were also bound in a single line, being hauled along.
Putting together the guy who whipped me and what was happening, the answer came out.
'War slaves.'
They were the defeated, captured after losing a war.
But what was even more shocking than that was the massive monster walking at the head of the line.
'Hydragon!'
That beast, a hydra with nine heads fused to the lower body of a dragon, felt bizarrely familiar.
I'd never seen it before, but the instant I saw it I knew what it was.
Hydragon.
The first hardship every single player of Pangaenia is guaranteed to face!
A lump of graphics had turned real and appeared right in front of me.
I'd raised nearly a thousand characters and killed that thing as many times as that number, so sure, I had to be familiar with it, but to be able to identify a game monster at a glance in reality wasn't normal.
'I need to get up.'
There was no time to get lost in awe.
If I stayed collapsed like this, I'd die.
The moment I stood up, a whip snapped through the air.
Agonizing pain made my hair stand on end, but I forced myself to swallow the groan.
"If you fall one more time, I'll throw you to Hydragon as feed."
…So it really was a Hydragon.
Now everything was certain.
'This is Pangaenia, did I get pulled into the game?'
Unthinkable.
I should've been panicking, but unbelievably, I was calm.
I'd grasped the situation and adapted in an instant.
'Every sensation, including touch, is no different from reality, …then.'
It was a game, yet it wasn't a game, it was exactly like reality, and I remembered rolling the dice at the very end.
All random.
Didn't I randomize everything?
If this body was the result, then there was something I had to check no matter what.
"Status window."
The moment I said it,
Shrrrk. A scroll of rolled parchment appeared before my eyes, uncoiling as it slowly unfurled.
Level: 1
Strength: 12 Stamina: 12 Agility: 12
Intelligence: 12 Mana: 12
[Health][Constitution][Intelligence][Senses]
[Swordsmanship][Shield Arts][Spearsmanship][Axe Arts][Dagger Arts][Archery]
[Light][Darkness][Fire][Water][Earth][Wind][Air]
[Void]
[Art][Academics][Leadership][Observation]
....
[Emptiness]
[Dexterity]
[All Master]
[Weapon Master]
[Giant's Magic Resistance]
[Druid's Nature Affinity ]
[Heart of the Ironblooded Monarch]
[Beast Lord]
[Golden Grace]
[Heavenly]
[Mutation]
[Glutton]
[Great Sage]
....
<
<
'Crazy.'
The curse that wanted to fly out the moment I saw it, I barely crushed back down.
A status window really did pop up, but what was in it made no sense.
First, the stats.
Normally, stats are set within a range of 1 to 10 depending on talents, but these were 12, and not just one, all of them, starting evenly at 12.
In five years of playing Pangaenia, I'd never seen a golden start like this.
And that wasn't all.
'How many talents are even marked here?'
The parchment rolled down without end, over two hundred talents were stamped in, and on top of that more than ten hidden traits were active.
Hidden traits were the kind of thing where even having just one could make you a peerless powerhouse who could "tear mountains apart and eclipse the world," and I had exactly thirteen.
'Thirteen hidden traits.'
Even named NPCs who'd devoured stars and transcended, even monsters at the absolute peak of the abyssal lore, didn't have thirteen hidden traits, at most they had around five.
Unprecedented.
Among them, one stood out glaringly.
'Heart of the Ironblooded Monarch!'
A linked trait that appears when you max every physical talent, and also a hidden trait, Heart of the Ironblooded Monarch.
Roughly speaking, it makes you "not tire easily, not be startled by most things, and accept situations quickly."
It also increases the unseen "stamina" and "honor," lets you receive higher-quality quests, and grants the "qualification of a ruler."
And I had thirteen things like that.
After taking all the hidden traits in, I read the next part.
'Pangaenia collapse, boundary with reality? I don't know what that means.'
I didn't get it, the only thing that was clear was that things far beyond any normal understanding were happening to me.
But I couldn't sink into thought forever.
"Hey."
I called to the man walking ahead.
A man missing the middle and index fingers of his right hand turned his head weakly to look at me.
"Why?"
"Where are we?"
"...? The Kaltzman Desert, obviously."
He looked at me like I'd passed out from the heat and left my brain behind, I ignored that and asked again.
"Kaltzman Desert? Don't tell me we're heading to Faisalmer."
The Kaltzman Desert in the southeast of the continent is an infamous land where three tribes have settled.
All three tribes make their living hunting slaves and waging wars like lunatics.
And Faisalmer was a kind of middle city where captured slaves were sold.
"Yeah, so give up on the idea of getting out alive."
Was that why there was no light in the slaves' eyes?
A slave taken into Faisalmer never makes it out alive.
'A place you should never pick as a starting point, if you get dropped in Kaltzman Desert, it's better to delete your character and start over.'
It had always been a notorious desert.
I remembered starting here once out of curiosity and giving up.
After that, I absolutely never chose Kaltzman Desert as a starting location.
'Damn it.'
Randomizing even my starting point was my mistake, who could I blame.
I tossed out my last bundle of questions.
"But did the Kaltzman tribes always handle slaves in such huge numbers?"
Even big slave traders handle at most a few dozen, but this line looked easily over three hundred.
The man frowned.
"How would I know that?"
"Then why are we being dragged off?"
"Why we got caught? Hell if I know, maybe because we were stragglers from the expedition?"
"Expedition? What expedition?"
"Haa… The Demon Realm expedition led by the Eight Heroes, we lost, and you and I ran and got caught, that's what happened, you heat-struck or something?"
Eight Heroes? Demon Realm expedition?
'Ah!'
...That was my story.
No, more precisely, it was the story of the character I'd been playing right before I made this one.
I gathered eight unique-class items from my eight strongest characters and formed an expedition.
And I spectacularly blew it.
I entered the Demon Realm, made it to near the Demon God Temple, but couldn't open the final door and got a game over.
Looks like it became known as the Eight Heroes and their expedition.
"Fuck, if we hadn't turned on each other, the expedition would've succeeded...!"
Turned on each other?
What turning on each other?
I was about to ask, but right then the ground shook.
At the same time,
"Main Quest 1: Survive!"
"Reward: Distributed according to results"
"Failure: Death — both your body in the game and in reality will die."
A quest appeared before my eyes.
Survive, in this situation?
Even more terrifying was the penalty for failing, did that "body in reality" really mean my real body?
The intro flashed through my mind, the image of Pangaenia and Earth colliding.
Kuurrrr… Kuurrrr…!
But there was no time to think longer.
With a savage roar, a gigantic mass was charging in from the distance.
"Three Hydragons!"
"Form up! Prepare for the raid!"
The slave traders, seasoned soldiers, drew their weapons and held their breath.
Enemies who had brought three Hydragons barreled in and began slaughtering the traders without a word.
"Snake Princess! It's the Snake Princess!"
"Snake Princess! Have you forgotten the non-aggression pact!"
"Aaagh!"
Screams exploded everywhere.
Ignoring pacts and rules alike, they were carrying out a massacre.
Yeah, a one-sided slaughter.
'If I stay still, I'll die!'
Instinct was screaming.
They didn't hesitate to kill slaves either.
It looked like their goal was to wipe out everyone here.
I snatched the key ring from the dead trader who'd whipped me, right in front of me.
The instant I unlocked my cuffs, I grabbed a scimitar and braced for the raid.
"M-me too!"
"Free me too!"
Soldiers from the former expedition saw the key ring and shouted.
They'd still been soldiers who marched into the Demon Realm, so I could've hoped they'd fight with me, but all of them were broken somewhere.
[Lv. 1]
[Lv. 2]
As proof, every soldier's level was between 1 and 2.
Level loss from physical damage and mental collapse.
But even so, the levels were absurdly low, an expeditionary force worse than a militia?
Thud!
"M-me first!"
"Argh! Move!"
When I threw the key ring to them, a brawl erupted.
It meant handle yourselves, I didn't have the time to unlock them one by one.
Even in that brief chaos, the slaughter kept going.
Pandemonium, would hell look like this?
'I have to survive.'